Your first memory of the Internet?

I was talking to a younger colleague the other day who said she does not remember a world before the Internet - in her world, it has always been here. That kind of took me aback, although it made sense. I'm sure there more than a handful of people on here for who it is also true.

My first memory? A Prodigy commercial when I was a sophomore or junior in high school. You could get the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica at your fingertips!

"Mom, we have to get this!"

A year or two later, I used AOL at a friend's house, my first time online, and wrote a high school newspaper story about the experience. Mostly we just chatted with people. I wonder if the hard copy still exists.

 

I don't know if email counts. I sent my first email my freshman year of college (1992).

When I was an intern in 1994 or 95, there was a floppy disc that had something called ESPN SportsZone on it. The paper had been sent it to review, but it was passed around and loaded onto everybody's computer. I think in the next year or so I was introduced to Prodigy and then later, AOL.

 

Probably around 1993-94, going on Prodigy to the Macgyver message boards and talking about the show.

 

Free porn

JK, it was definitely AOL 3.0 or whatever one of the first ones were. You'd hear it try to connect, then it'd be really annoying and screechy, and when it connected you had a sigh of relief.

 

When I came back to school with SportsZone on my laptop, my roommates acted like I had just hit the lottery.

 

That horrible squeaky dial up sound, waiting for AOL to connect...and then getting the inevitable busy signal.

 

Seems like there was a version of email on the library computers when I was in college in the late 1980s, but I didn't have access to it. This stuff all kind of runs together in this industry; riding the wire on the sports desk in 1993 was not unlike surfing the net. My first actual web site visited was probably in 1995 at my second daily paper stop. First email was in 1998 after I bought my second home computer -- A Gateway PC that probably had a 486 processor and cost around $1500. The email was to a former coworker.

 

I'd heard of e-mail when I was in the Army, but I hadn't heard of the Internet until some nightly news report in November of 1993 or thereabouts. But the weekly I started out with was one of the first newspapers in the state to have an online presence, somewhere in 1995. I built a house ad promoting it that won a contest the following year.

 

First memory of the 'internet" was in the late 80s, but I still laugh about the time I called AOL a few years ago about some account problem and the CS rep paused for a long time before asking me if I had really been a subscriber for "that long"

 

People still subscribe to AOL? Why?